The Big Chill:
Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter
By Adam Nayman
Larry Fessenden’s Wendigo (2001) concludes with a scene in which a small boy faces down a pair of boots left sitting in a hospital corridor. The boots belonged to his father who has just died on the operating table, the victim of a senseless tragedy perpetrated by a stranger; they’ve been absent-mindedly dropped on the ground by his wife whose grief precludes her from noticing her son languishing at the other end of the hallway. As Fessenden cuts between the boy, stock-still and tiny beneath the high ceiling, and the forlorn, abandoned footwear, a plangent visual metaphor emerges: this small child suddenly has some very big shoes to fill.
It’s solemn stuff for a movie named for—and featuring several jarring intrusions by—an ominous bi-pedal Native American deer-spirit. But Fessenden’s cinema is distinguished by the various miraculous equilibriums it sustains, precarious but increasingly sure-footed balancing acts between seemingly exclusive concepts: high-concept and low-budget, abstraction and immediacy, the shopworn and the visionary. No Telling (1991) clumsily but ambitiously re-framed the Frankenstein story through the lens of the animal-rights debate, while Habit (1997) unravelled the bleak tale of a disheveled teetotaler (played by Fessenden himself in a twitchy tour-de-force) whose new girlfriend just might be a vampire. The shoestring tangle of big themes (scientific progress vs. cruelty in No Telling, the monstrousness of addiction and the spectre of AIDS in Habit) and earnest B-movie craftsmanship in these films found refinement in Wendigo, an emotional end-of-childhood narrative (adapted from a short story by Algernon Blackwood) augmented by fluid camerawork, neatly integrated low-fi special-effects, and a fascinating eco-horror subtext—the titular creature as a manifestation of our fragile ecosystem’s wrath.
The wendigo makes a return appearance of sorts in Fessenden’s astonishing new film The Last Winter. While it’s not technically a sequel, there’s little doubt that the malevolent entities menacing the film’s principals—a corporate-backed deep-drilling crew trolling for oil beneath the pristine white expanse of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—share a kinship with said antlered phantom. In both cases, the creatures target human beings who have encroached on and despoiled their turf, but where Wendigo’s monster was ultimately revealed to be a protector of sorts (its lone victim being a remorseless backwoods hunter with human and animal deaths on his conscience), the things that show up in the last movement of The Last Winter boast dauntingly larger—even apocalyptic—appetites.
Like Bong Joon-ho’s marvelous (if more straightforward) The Host, The Last Winter is an environmental horror movie in which our excesses come home to roost: Hell hath no fury like Mother Nature scorned. It begins as a careful inventory of horror-movie clichés (an isolated, fractious group warding off frostbite, paranoia, and possible ghosts; shades of John Carpenter’s version of The Thing [1982] and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining [1980]) and evolves—methodically and brilliantly—into a dead-serious and deeply distressing End of Days saga. The pervasive sense of head-hung melancholy suggests Kurosawa Kiyoshi, except that Fessenden isn’t dealing in technophobic vagaries. The Last Winter addresses issues of global warming and environmental ruin without cloaking them in allegory—it’s hard to imagine a more direct assessment of the horrors that will emerge out of our failed stewardship of the planet.
The gale-force denouement would be irrelevant, however, were the build-up not so expertly handled: Fessenden’s technique, prone previously to fits and starts, has never seemed so assured. As in Wendigo, the director displays a real mastery for wintry environs: the camera swirls around the drillers’ lonely outpost on the same weightless trajectory as the snow itself. Inside, the major personalities are quickly established: Pollack (Ron Perlman) is the team leader, his alpha-male pissing act (he punctuates every other sentence with “goddamnit”) fortified by a bear-like bulk and the lean, hard lines of his face. Next on the food chain is Abby (Connie Britton), Pollack’s unofficial right-hand woman and occasional lover. At the low end of the pecking order—after a few vividly gruff veterans—is Hoffman (James LeGros) a pasty, weak-chinned eco-watchdog who’s come to Alaska to conduct an environmental-impact study.
That’s too many syllables for Pollack, whose rugged-individualist bravado smartly conceals a neutered company man’s lack of imagination. Pollack doesn’t want to hear about Hoffman’s reservations, but when things start going weird—and to Fessenden’s credit, it happens very gradually—there comes a point where he has no choice but to deviate from his rigorous battle plan. The conflicts are myriad: there’s the war of attrition between Pollack and Hoffman; the sexual gamesmanship of Abby (who shacks up with Hoffman on the sly but remains caught between the two men); the crew’s difficulties with their unusually harsh environs; and Hoffman’s frustrating internal conflict. He knows that something is wrong—the weather is out of whack, and seems to be contributing to the mental strife (sleeplessness, hallucinations, somnambulism) of his colleagues—but his inability to articulate this admittedly amorphous threat, or to really stand up to the domineering Hoffman, renders him impotent, frantically scrawling out his fears in a notebook as things fall apart.
There is a point at which The Last Winter shifts from a story about ideological intractability and cold-addled stir-craziness into a genuine genre piece: suffice it to say that it’s one of the scariest scenes in recent memory, possibly the best prepared and delivered shock of Fessenden’s career. And yet the film never loses its grasp on its characters—the groups’ reactions to the escalating strangeness are uncommonly intelligent (Pollack is obstinate, but not stupid, to Perlman’s credit ), and the individuals are differentiated enough that what happens to them matters to us. There are no easy victims in Fessenden’s films; each loss is felt, and felt hard.
It is this quality of feeling that distinguishes The Last Winter not only from the current crop of sado-porn horror films, but from most eco-scare pictures, as well: the gorgeous abstraction of Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes and the pointed finger-wagging of An Inconvenient Truth are both valid approaches to an unthinkably terrifying subject, but neither film really qualifies as an emotional experience. The Last Winter fairly tingles with empathy—for its autonomous but doomed characters, for the wounded Earth spirits that pursue them, and for our battered, scooped-out planet. Wendigo introduced the idea of a rapacious demon with an insatiable appetite (“The bigger it gets, the hungrier it gets”), hinting that the carnivore in question was, in fact us. The Last Winter confirms this postulation, and without a trace of glib, told-you-so smugness. “We can’t go home again,” reads one of Hoffman’s notebook scribbles. It’s a familiar sentiment, but completely devastating in this particular context: this is a film about the present devouring the future.
There is also a key shot in The Last Winter involving a pair of boots. But where Wendigo (explicitly referenced again in a jaw-dropping late shot of a house far away from the main action) suggested that the shoes, and the attendant responsibilities attached to them, might be capably filled by an approaching successor. This time out, the owner is moving inexorably in the other direction, towards oblivion. It’s bad enough to admit that we’ve burdened the next generation with salvaging the mess we’ve made of our only home; what’s worse—and what The Last Winter, in its towering, inconsolable sadness, understands —is that they might never get the chance to pick up the slack.
CINEMA SCOPE: The Last Winter feels to me like an enlargement of Wendigo—the same idea of a vengeful spirit getting bigger and hungrier and angrier, is now taken to an apocalyptic extreme.
LARRY FESSENDEN: It did develop in my mind as a sequel to Wendigo, or as a continuation of that film. I wanted to re-imagine the creature. But this movie borrows more from the original story from Algernon Blackwood than Wendigo does—anyone who’s read that story will recognize certain images, like the feet in the snow.
SCOPE: I always appreciated that the special effects were deliberately low-fi in Wendigo. The title character was supposed to look like a child’s idea of a deer-ghost-spirit. And I suspect the same thing applies here despite the bigger budget. The malevolent entities, when they finally do appear, are hardly seamless. They’re these barely tangible phantoms.
FESSENDEN: I did want something that was intangible, yes. When we’re talking about global warming or climate change, these are things we can’t get our minds around. But even in using CGI, I’m still going for a more hallucinogenic experience than anything literal: the creature still lives primarily in the characters’ minds.
SCOPE: There’s no doubt that this is a more explicitly environmental horror movie than Wendigo.
FESSENDEN: My curse is that I’m obsessed with the political issues of the day—the struggles that we have in America. I have a great melancholy about our treatment of the environment. So these themes always creep into my movies. I’m trying to make these nice B-movies that people can enjoy, but they get burdened—or haunted—by these very important issues. It’s totally intuitive.
SCOPE: It feels that way. When George Romero makes Land of the Dead (2005)it’s not really a B-movie: the subtext consciously overwhelms the main text. It’s a more of a determined sociological critique. Your film reminded me more of something like The Host, or maybe something by Kurosawa Kiyoshi.
FESSENDEN: I haven’t seen these films, but I’m aware of them. You’ll find that I’m very film illiterate these days. I’m still feeding off the movies I saw as a kid—I’m more engaged in the issues of the day. My friends make fun of me because I never go to the movies. It’s nice to know that there are kindred spirits, though. I kind of work in a filmic void, and so I sometimes wonder if there’s any place for what I do.
SCOPE: Is one of the movies you’re feeding off here The Birds (1963)?
FESSENDEN: Well, you can’t put a crow in a movie without someone thinking of that…
SCOPE: Maybe more in the sense that the characters are at the mercy of larger forces looking to punish them for their transgressions? And also, putting a murder of crows in a horror movie is a pretty suggestive homage.
FESSENDEN: Yes. There are a lot of hallway shots in this movie, and so The Shining is evoked. And there are menacing birds, so it invokes The Birds. That’s my love of cinema, even if it’s been truncated. I’m regurgitating the movies I grew up on.
SCOPE: Your style certainly isn’t truncated. The fluid camera movements and unusual editing decisions that felt slightly affected in your earlier films now seem less tentative or experimental, and more confident.
FESSENDEN: It’s always a struggle. I never know if I’m getting it. I know that my themes can be hard to master. But I do have intuition about how to make a film. The medium is something I understand.
SCOPE: You mention that your themes are difficult to master, but what really got me about the film is the directness of it. It would be hard to miss the point, although maybe I shouldn’t underestimate horror movie audiences. Is it frustrating to make demanding movies for a largely undemanding constituency?
FESSENDEN: Well, I’m trying to make B-movies with A-movie themes. Believe me, I come to some festivals and feel like an outsider. Like, “Why couldn’t I have just made Hide and Seek?” You know, with Robert De Niro? It’s an awful film, but…there is a feeling sometimes of wanting to fit in and be loved. All I can say is I’ve stayed true to my original impulse to make films that express my impressions of life, and my affection for genre.
SCOPE: Wendigo ends on a shot of a pair of boots in a hallway waiting to be filled—there’s this sense of taking responsibility. It’s sad, but it’s also hopeful. In The Last Winter, there are also boots, but they’re left empty. They’re not going to be filled. It’s just such a mournful image.
FESSENDEN: I’m obsessed with the shoes. I’ll leave it your interpretation, but it’s definitely there. My movies are mostly about loss, I think, more than the horror or the fear. Most horror films focus on fear, and that’s the last emotion they give you. But I’m focused on the melancholy that comes after the horrendous crime. If we have destroyed our planet, than of course it’s terrifying. But it’s also so sad. We can never go home again —we can never be young again.
SCOPE: Which is what Hoffman scribbles in his notebook, except that he actually does get taken home.
FESSENDEN: It’s the house from Wendigo, actually…
SCOPE: Yes. I couldn’t believe that you were doing that.
FESSENDEN: At that point in the movie, you see that the monster isn’t necessarily all bad. Or it depends on where you’re coming from. It is bad for Pollack, but with Hoffman, there’s some gentleness.
SCOPE: And yet they’re both at its mercy lying out there in the snow. They’re equally prone and helpless in its presence. It’s another very direct statement.
FESSENDEN: The monster is not serving a traditional monster function in the story. It is a presence more than an antagonist. I love the creature in Sexy Beast (2000); it haunts Ray Winstone’s character. I’m interested in monsters as metaphor, the way they really do exist in our lives, haunting or crushing us, or maybe keeping us company. We all know that horror has always brought up the big issues. The giant ants in Them! (1954) were about the anxiety around the atomic bomb. Same with Godzilla (1954). In David J. Skal’s book The Monster Show, he talks about how Frankenstein (1931) and Freaks (1930) were made after veterans came home from World War I horribly maimed. Horror has always addressed anxiety, so I thought it was time to address this great big elephant in the room—global warming. We can’t quite grasp it because we’re so complicit.
SCOPE: As in Wendigo, you’re playing with Native mysticism in The Last Winter, but in a way that’s not exploitative or condescending. How do you skirt cliché with something like that?
FESSENDEN: You have to tread carefully. But I’m not pandering to some liberal imagery: it’s a fact of history. The Native peoples did look after the land, and the white man has not. All my films deal with the excesses of the white man’s perspective and his narcissism and destructiveness. Read Vine Deloria’s God Is Red for some perspective. There’s real righteous outrage there.
SCOPE: It’s a nice move to cast Ron Perlman, who is one of the most likeable genre-movie actors around, as this unrepentant, faintly Dubya-ish environmental rapist.
FESSENDEN: There is one scene around the campfire where we see Pollack soften a bit. He’s making an effort to understand the other side, but then he retracts and goes off on a God tangent.
SCOPE: And if you break down his antagonistic, futile relationship with Hoffman—this meek conservationist—it starts to fall across the basic political lines that have been drawn in the US.
FESSENDEN: During the shoot we talked about having a picture of Bush in the background somewhere. But I thought that long after Bush, this battle for hearts and minds will still be happening. Let’s not tether it to a passing figurehead. Let’s keep it more iconic: the bald eagle, the fetishizing of oil and drilling.
SCOPE: A lot of liberal movies oversimplify things by having infallible progressive heroes and clearly evil conservative bad guys—the way so many documentaries use George Bush—but Hoffman is a uniquely troubling figure. He’s right about what’s going on, but he’s very passive, very ineffectual.
FESSENDEN: I believe that Hoffman is a weak character in many ways; he’s melancholy and conflicted, while there’s something very gung-ho about Pollock—he’s getting the job done, and although his choices are often wrong, there’s a lot of conviction to them. There’s something compelling there, a real American spirit. But that gung-ho spirit isn’t enough, of course, we have to start making more intelligent decisions, and to accept confusion and ambiguity and fallibility. One trope in the film is that there are a lot of scenes where the same discussion happens: Hoffman in various ways stating, “I think we have a problem.” But as long as he can’t define it precisely, Pollack can resist acting upon it, and challenge Hoffman’s assertion. We have to agree there is a problem if we want to solve it together. I think the film offers a portrait of partisan impasse.
SCOPE: The most interesting character, though, is Abby. She’s literally in bed with both Pollack and Hoffman. She’s caught between them. She endures the longest of any character in the film by taking a middle position, but eventually, she’s swept up, too.
FESSENDEN: That’s very critical. The middle ground won’t do.
SCOPE: You just talked about how Pollack’s gung-ho spirit isn’t sufficient. The settler mentality was one thing when the landscape was actually being settled, and another at this point in time.
FESSENDEN: Absolutely. We now have tools that resonate far louder than the axe to the tree. History is linear. We are continuing. We have to take responsibility for where we are now. We’re not just finding food for our families or building roofs over our heads—we’re devastating rainforests to print the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.
SCOPE: But can you ask people to give up their Victoria’s Secret catalogues?
FESSENDEN: Good God I would never say that. But if they could just use recycled paper…
SCOPE: There have been rumours that you’re re-cutting the film. Does this have to do with audience responses in Toronto? Is it an attempt to make it more palatable to distributors?
FESSENDEN: I have in the past been lucky enough to revisit all three of my feature films between their festival play and their ultimate distribution. With No Telling I cut 20 minutes, with Habit I cut seven, and with Wendigo I actually re-shot some scenes after my Slamdance premiere and a glowing review from Variety. There are many types of artists, and I seem to be in the category of those who are compelled to revisit and refine the same material over and over. I believe in the expression “a work is never finished, only abandoned.” I saw The Last Winter for the first time on the big screen in Toronto, and I had an immediate desire to tinker with the edit again, and especially the mix. I don't believe these changes will secure distribution so much as inspire those companies that were already interested. As for the changes, I believe they help clarify the film, and strengthen the impact. I am, at last, ready to move on.
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